There is an argument one hears with increasing frequency in Pan-Africanist circles, in WhatsApp groups, in political debates across the continent: Africa does not need to copy Western electoral systems, because our societies are fundamentally different. According to this reasoning, the African president is a father of the nation, a chief in the traditional sense, and as long as the people live in peace and tranquility, there is no valid reason to replace him. We are told that the relationship between the people and their leader in Africa is of a particular nature, that our cultures and traditions are not comparable to those of the West, that we cannot speak to the chief any way we please because the context is different.
This argument, however appealing it may seem to those who make it, does not withstand historical analysis. And it is precisely because it wraps itself in identity pride that it is dangerous — it renders invisible the void it contains.
A Mechanical Problem, Not a Cultural One
Before going further, a fundamental distinction must be drawn that many refuse to make: elections are not a Western moral ideal. They are an institutional technology designed to solve a universal problem — how to transfer power without people killing each other to obtain it.
The pre-democratic history of all civilizations — African, European, Asian, Arab — is marked by the same cycle of remarkable brutality. A sovereign rules. Others, who believe they have equal legitimacy or ability, nurse a quiet frustration. Upon his death, or sometimes before, the question of succession triggers wars that can last generations. Entire dynasties are exterminated. Entire peoples pay the price for the power struggle of a few.
What elections introduced in civilizations that adopted them seriously is not the moral wisdom of a people. It is patience. The institutional capacity to replace violent urgency with organized waiting.
The ability to say: this man I do not like, who governs in a way that frustrates me, who occupies a position others might deserve just as much — he will not last forever. There is a date. And on that date, anyone can run, and the people decide. This simple mechanism has spared entire nations cycles of violence measured not in lost lives but in sacrificed generations. This is not a question of culture. It is a question of institutional mechanics.
The Fundamental Historical Error
Here now is the truth that those who hold the discourse of “African exceptionalism” either do not know or refuse to consider. The personalization of power, the untouchability of the leader, the absence of freedom of expression, violent dynastic successions — these dynamics are not African. They are human. Every civilization has experienced them. Without exception.
But let us go further, because this is where the argument becomes truly interesting. This gap did not only exist between today’s Africa and medieval Europe. It also existed between ancient Europe and medieval Europe itself. Ancient Rome — in its political organization, its institutions, its juridical sophistication with Roman law, its relative separation of powers between Senate and magistrates — was institutionally far ahead of the Germanic peoples of the Middle Ages or certain feudal Anglo-Saxon peoples who lived under rudimentary conditions of social organization. No one concluded that the Germans or the Anglo-Saxons were culturally incapable of building solid institutions. Germany and the United Kingdom are today among the most stable democracies in the world.
What this example illustrates is that observing differences in the level of institutional development between civilizations at a given moment says nothing about the permanent capacity or the irreducible cultural nature of those civilizations. These are universal political dynamics that some societies resolved earlier than others, in different historical contexts. To believe otherwise is to confuse the stage with the destiny.
Colonization: Real Factor, Insufficient Explanation
It would be intellectually dishonest not to address this question directly, because it will be the first argument raised: what about colonization? It disrupted societies, erased local institutions, drew artificial borders, and left behind states whose form corresponded to no pre-existing reality.
All of this is true. And it must be said clearly. Colonization constituted a violent and profound interruption of the institutional development of many African societies. This is not an argument that can be dismissed with a wave of the hand, and this text does not pretend to do so.
But here is the question that must be asked with the same honesty: does colonization explain the inability to build stable mechanisms for the transfer of power sixty years after independence? Japan was devastated by two atomic bombs and foreign military occupation. Germany was destroyed, divided, and rebuilt under foreign tutelage. South Korea was, in the 1960s, poorer than several African countries. None of these countries used historical trauma as a permanent horizon. They built institutions. This is not a comparison to rank suffering — it is a demonstration that historical trauma, however real, is not a perpetual condemnation.
The Myth of Returning to Ancestral Values
This same reasoning error appears, in an even more radical form, in the Pan-Africanist argument that to develop, Africa must return to its ancestral values, even to its traditional spiritual practices.
Here is the simple test to evaluate the soundness of a principle: if it is true, it must apply universally, not only where it is convenient. If returning to ancestral values is the key to a people’s development, then this principle should hold for all peoples. Let us then tell the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes — whose ancestors, the Vikings, believed in Valhalla, worshipped Odin and Thor, and organized their society around a deeply elaborate ancestral cosmology — that they must abandon their current institutions and return to their ancestors’ worship to develop. This proposition would be absurd, and everyone would see it immediately, precisely because these countries are among the most developed in the world without having needed to return to their ancestral traditions.
The conclusion is inescapable: development is not a question of religion or ancestral worship. It is a question of operational values — justice, the rule of law, institutional accountability, the protection of individual rights. Countries with radically different religious and cultural systems have achieved comparable levels of institutional development. What they have in common is not their gods. It is the solidity of their institutions.
Where Elections Have Worked in Africa
If the argument of “African cultural exceptionalism” were valid, one would expect to observe uniform instability across the continent, regardless of the political systems adopted. This is not what the facts show.
Botswana has held multi-party elections since its independence in 1966. It has experienced no coups, no civil wars, no violent succession crises in sixty years. It is today one of the best-governed countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with one of the lowest levels of corruption on the continent. Namibia, independent since 1990, has achieved several peaceful transfers of power and maintains remarkable political stability in a region marked by tensions. Ghana has accomplished several peaceful alternations since 1992, including transfers of power between opposition parties — which represents the most demanding test of a functioning democracy. Mauritius has been a stable democracy since its independence in 1968, with regular alternations and functioning institutions. Cape Verde and Benin have also demonstrated that peaceful transfer of power is possible on the continent, and that the resulting stability is not an accident but a direct consequence of institutional credibility.
These countries do not share the same language, the same religion, the same colonial history, or the same natural resources. What they share is substantive — not merely formal — respect for mechanisms of power transfer.
However, one must be rigorous: elections alone are not sufficient. Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria have all held elections that produced crises instead of stability. The reason does not invalidate the principle — it refines it. When elections are not credible, when they are not framed by independent institutions — justice, administration, accountable security forces — they can become triggers of violence rather than regulators. This is not an argument against elections. It is an argument for the institutions that give them substance.
Stability Without Institutions: A Long-Term Illusion
Faced with this argument, proponents of strong power invariably cite two examples: China and Russia. Both cases deserve rigorous examination, without complacency or demonization.
The Chinese case is the more serious one. The Chinese Communist Party struck an implicit pact with its people: you give up political freedoms, and in exchange, we build the country. This pact has been honored over several decades, with measurable and undeniable results — hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty. What structurally distinguishes China from most authoritarian regimes is that the Party has a real internal meritocracy and mechanisms for power rotation, even if they are neither transparent nor accessible to the population. But here is the structural fragility this system carries within it: it works as long as the Party delivers. If the pact breaks, there exists no peaceful mechanism for recalibration. This is precisely the time bomb that credible elections were designed to defuse. And history — including recent history — has shown us that twenty or thirty years of apparent stability say nothing about the durability of a system when tested by a major crisis.
The Russian case is superficially similar but structurally very different. Putin’s legitimacy rests on three pillars: hydrocarbon revenues, national pride rebuilt after the humiliation of the 1990s, and the figure of the strongman against a West perceived as hostile. None of these pillars is institutional. They are personal. What fundamentally brings Russia closer to many fragile regimes is not its power — it is precisely this dependence on the leader rather than on institutions. The difference is the nuclear arsenal and oil revenues. Not the model.
And then there are those who cite these examples in Africa while forgetting a fundamental truth: borrowing an authoritarian model without reproducing its counterparts is wanting the whip without the contract. China and Russia, in their most defensible versions, at least offer a perceived economic stability, a coherent national project, perceived protection against real external threats. A regime where one clan enriches itself while the rest of the country grows poorer meets none of these conditions. It borrows authoritarianism without the counterpart. Power without responsibility.
Morocco, or the Path of the Implicit Contract
There exists, however, an African example that deserves honest examination: Morocco. It is not a democracy in the full sense of the term — power remains concentrated and political freedoms are limited. But it is a monarchy that has progressively built institutions, invested massively in infrastructure, and created the conditions for an emerging middle class.
What Morocco illustrates is not the superiority of monarchy over democracy. It illustrates that the long-term legitimacy of a power depends on its capacity to develop its country, and not merely on its capacity to maintain itself. This model nonetheless remains dependent on a fragile balance between economic performance and political control — and its long-term future will depend on its capacity to progressively widen the institutional space. But it demonstrates at least that stability is built through development, not solely through repression.
What We Must Understand
The lesson of all this is not that Africa must “copy” the West. This formulation is itself an intellectual trap, because it presupposes that elections and the rule of law are Western cultural inventions like the baguette or fish and chips. Elections are a solution to a universal human problem. The rule of law is a response to a universal human tendency: the temptation of arbitrary power. These solutions emerged in the West at a particular moment in its history, precisely because the West had suffered sufficiently from their absence to build them. Other civilizations developed analogous forms — the merchant republics of the Mali Empire, certain council traditions in West Africa — before colonization interrupted these trajectories.
This is therefore not a question of identity. It is not a question of the relationship to the ancestor. It is a question of institutional mechanics. Societies that have built mechanisms for peaceful transfer of power, independent institutions, and a separation of functions between those who govern and those who judge — these societies are more stable. Not because they are morally superior. Because these mechanisms solve real problems that the absence of institutions leaves unanswered.
To refuse to see this is to choose short-term pride over long-term freedom. And that kind of pride — universal history, without exception — has never rewarded.
